THE AMERICAN RIGHT AND U.S. LABOR:
POLITICS, IDEOLOGY, AND IMAGINATION

An Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of California, Santa
BarbaraJanuary 16-17, 2009
University of California, Santa Barbara

Sponsored by the UCSB Center for the Study of Work,
Labor, and
Democracy; UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment; the
UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Department of
History, College of Letters and Sciences, Hull Chair in Feminist
Studies; and the University of Pennsylvania Press.

An intense and systematic hostility to trade unionism on the part of
American conservatism is hardly news. It has been a notable feature of
the nation’s political landscape for decades. But an
understanding and deconstruction of this phenomenon requires something
more than mere condemnation, especially during the next few years when
a labor-liberal effort to reform of the American labor law, along with
the rise of labor’s influence within the Democratic Party, is
almost certain to generate a furious and determined counter attack from
those who seek to limit the power and marginalize the legitimacy of
U.S. trade unionism.

A dress rehearsal for the coming debate was on display
during 2007 when organized labor and its Democratic allies sought
Congressional passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, designed to
advance unionism by institutionalizing “card check” and
providing a mechanism for arbitration of first contracts. Anti-union
conservatives – in Congress, the Chamber of Commerce, the
Right-to-Work Legal Defense Foundation, within the world of the
rightwing think tanks, and on the editorial pages of some leading
newspapers – mobilized their money, their men, and their ideology
to define this reform as corrupt, coercive, and hostile to the existing
purposes of the labor law. One infamous advertisement filled an entire
page of newsprint with three headshots: that of North Korea’s Kim
Jong-il, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and American trade union leader
Bruce Raynor. Above their pictures was the quote "There’s
no reason to subject the workers to an election" and below the query,
"Who said it?" It was Raynor, of course, now made to seem clearly in
league with the Communist dictators. The mysteriously funded
Center for Union Facts, which paid for the ad, then asserted, "Find out
how union leaders are forcing people to pay dues by trashing
democracy."

Such claims have resonance. Indeed, the labor movement and
its allies in Congress and in academe have had considerable difficulty
in deciding upon the most efficacious counter to this anti-union
propaganda. Should these pseudo-democratic claims be ignored and all
emphasis placed upon the economic and moral benefits of a larger and
more robust trade union movement and upon survey data that show that a
majority of U.S. workers want to join a union? Or should the
accusation, that "card check" was less democratic and more coercive
than an NLRB election be directly confronted, perhaps with the
counterclaim that unions are first and foremost voluntary associations
protected by the constitution itself and an institution whose existence
is solely determined by the will of those workers who seek to form
it.

This conference seeks to explore the character of those political
institutions, ideological impulses, and journalistic/rhetorical tropes
that have been deployed in this conservative effort to marginalize and
delegitimize American trade unionism. We have thus far accepted papers
from some 32 individuals, chiefly historians and legal scholars. Their
work offers multiple, complementary insights into a heretofore
unexplored world of right-wing ideas and praxis.

Several panelists and keynote speaker Fred Feinstein, the NLRB’s
Clinton-era General Counsel, explore the contours of the fierce,
contemporary debate over the Employee Free Choice Act, the first
thoroughgoing effort to reform the American labor law in more than 60
years. Some of the commentators at our conference will be practitioners
from the world of law, labor education, the labor movement, and
contemporary politics. This mix should be beneficial to both groups,
informing the academics of the issues and obstacles confronting those
who seek a contemporary reform of the labor law, at the same time that
the historians provide texture, depth, and a comparative institutional
and ideological context that might aid those now engaged in legislative
and political debate.